Picture this.Camera in hand, I stood atop the low bluffs between Elizabethtown’s historic Rose Hotel and the broad Ohio. With luck I just might get an adequate photograph of the river, complete with floating logs, etc. While framing in, I heard a metallic squawk off to the left, and blamed it on a small boat, perhaps even a barge, but a quick turn about revealed a heron. Only three quick shots were allowed. Two of them went awry.

When I showed the photo to friends, two of them said the bird was a pelican. I told them that couldn’t be, that some pelicans had, indeed, been in Hardin County earlier in the year, but were gone by now.

I am not a birder, which means it cannot be stated here with 100 percent certainty the bird shown shadowing the broad and sun-tinted Ohio is a great blue heron. Until someone who knows says for sure, it remains a GBH as far as I’m concerned.

Whatever the pedigree, it's pretty great, and is not and never will be a pelican.